


You're Still Breaking My Heart

by BeautifulLife



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fantasy, Historical, Interquel, New York City, Quests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 15:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8897773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulLife/pseuds/BeautifulLife
Summary: Queenie has always known exactly what people want of her, and mostly she gives it to them.In an interquel to events near the end of the Fantastic Beasts movie, Queenie deals with the consequences of rules and faces a mysterious new peril. Plot and title inspired by the song "Every Day" (Nick Fradiani); story explores elements of the wizarding world of New York beyond the movie.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie, as this is an interquel that fills a gap near the end. The plot line is inspired by a song called "Every Day," by Nick Fradiani, which provides the title as well. This adventure turned out to require some exploration of the Jewish wizarding world in 1926 New York City, as well as tackling the issue of cultural blending and appropriation. There's a long note at the end about historic research. For now: if you recognize it from the movie, it belongs to J.K. Rowling.

 

 

Queenie has always known exactly what people want of her, and mostly she gives it to them.

Right now, as she crosses the bustling lobby of MACUSA headquarters, her Louis heels making a satisfying tap-tap on the marble floor, people want two new things of her and although she’s not a person who hates, she hates. . . no, she’s _uncomfortable with_ both.

The larger group—or at least the ones who seek eye contact—slosh with pity. _::Poor girl, associating with a No-Maj, she’ll get over it, she’s a good girl at heart, just show us you’re normal, all right? ::_

She straightens her back, lifts her chin a notch higher, and returns their hellos without slowing a stride that, for all her practiced wiggle, is faster than anyone expects.

The second group thinks they’re evading her notice by huddling in the shadows of the bronze statues of martyrs, but they can’t resist the urge to stare. When she catches their eyes she feels like water circling a drain. :: _Another Dorcus, just watch. First it’s befriending a No-Maj, next it’s telling them our secrets. She’ll double-cross us. She’ll double-cross us. She’s a traitor at heart.::_

She won’t refuse eye contact with them. She is not _ashamed._ She wants to run up to them, grab them by the lapels of their slim wool suits, and spit the truth in their faces. _Jacob would never betray us. He loved what he saw of the wizarding world. We could have trusted him._

She won’t do that, either.

At the head of the stairs, she glances at the clock overhead. The larger of its curlicued iron hands rests in the center of the narrow blue arc that means _high alert._

It’s pointed there since the day after the capture of Grindelwald, as MACUSA tries to sort out how Director Graves could have been someone else for who-knows-how-long. Having, barely a week ago, met her sister running from a death sentence that wouldn’t have even _happened_ if President Piquery had _listened_ , Queenie doesn’t give favorable odds on that mystery being solved any time soon.

She should take it as a good sign that her MACUSA co-workers have recovered enough aplomb to have bull sessions about her.

“Miss Goldstein, are you all right?” The clear gray eyes of Nathaniel Fairchild, Graves’ confidential secretary, peer down at her. _::She’s on the verge of cracking. Maybe that’ll take the heat off me. Every secret leads to a deeper secret, so she must have some doozies.::_

Queenie swallows before forcing the wide, innocent smile that shows her back teeth. “Everything’s jake,” she says.

That’s the truth. Everything still says _Jacob_ to her.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

Queenie walks home because dragots don’t work for buying subway tokens.

Queenie walks home because the day after Grindelwald was caught, she stood in an Apparating stall in the basement of MACUSA and could not visualize her home well enough to be sure she’d get there without leaving a toe or an arm or an eyebrow behind.

She doesn’t have to speak to the No-Majs brushing by her in the chasm between cliffs of ornate brownstone and painted iron. The thoughts she fishes from passing glances are a running murmur of hope and worry that asks nothing of her.

None of them is Jacob Kowalski.

Thoughts have a timbre and a texture, as much as voices. Jacob’s thoughts were like a well-sanded, carefully oiled rolling pin: solid and functional, with the smoothness that comes from losing rough edges, but capable of moving surprisingly quickly. She would know him even if her gaze brushed his for a bare second in a crowd.

When Queenie peers into wide shop windows, her reflection is lost in the sparkle of Christmas displays. She and Tina exchanged Hanukkah presents last week—Edna Warthog’s best-selling _The Age of Innocents_ for Tina, and a half-pound box of Fairie Mab’s chocolates in the spiffiest flavors from Tina to her, as well as the usual token stuff—so there’s nothing she should buy, even if she had No-Maj money, which she doesn’t.

But the stores have dresses in the shimmering blues and greens and purples of Newt Scamander’s Occamy, like nothing she’s seen at the dances sponsored by wizarding society. She wants. . . she doesn’t want. . . Tina would look so pretty in. . . Tina would say that Newt probably doesn’t want to _date_ an Occamy.

At the corner of Houston, Queenie is glancing over a display of books when she’s clutched by despair like she’s never felt before, not even when the assistant dean of Ilvermorny told her that her parents were dead.

She turns to seek out the source before common sense tells her that she’d have to have made eye contact in the shop window, and there’s nothing at all there, not a person looking out at her, not a person looking over her shoulder. No one is paying attention to her—it’s still rush hour, even a swanky doll like her can’t compete with the call of dinner and errands—but the _grief,_ the darkness, wraps itself around her and pulls her to her knees on the icy sidewalk.

“Miss. Are you all right, miss?”

The hands beneath her elbows lack the _spark_ that comes from a wizard, but she knows before making eye contact that it’s not Jacob. The No-Maj is all long legs and arms in a plaid double-breasted suit. A strand of well-oiled hair has come loose across his forehead, and the concern in his brown eyes matches his thoughts.

As she lets him lift her to her feet, the misery recedes—slowly, not without a parting ripple that pushes tears into her eyes—so she’s telling more-or-less the truth when she says: “Thank you. Everything’s jake.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

 “It was magic.”

Queenie doesn’t look away from the potato grating itself into a yellow stoneware bowl. The fine-grained control of cooking has always been easier for her than big things like Apparating, so even a little shaky as she is today, she doesn’t _need_ to keep her eyes on each step. But watching a potato shred itself to pieces means giving Tina the mental privacy to digest the news on her own.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Tina says after the kind of pause that she uses to sort emotions into boxes that she then locks tight.

“Not so many that I don’t know the feel of magic.” Queenie points her wand at the back burner and mutters _Pamatanamoky._ The gas flame obligingly rises to the right height for frying.

“I’ll try to get a look at records of wand use tomorrow.”

Queenie lets the splash of eggs and the flounce of flour into the potato bowl speak for her feelings.

“If it’s serious, the aurors are already investigating it,” Tina says, reasonably. Her reasonableness makes her a great comfort, except when it doesn’t. “I’m not the best person to ask MACUSA for anything at the moment.”

“You pulled their bacon out of the fire.”

“They were more comfortable with it where it was.”

The potato pancake batter mixes itself, then drops, like neat ping-pong balls, into the bubbling oil. Silence stretches long enough for the warmth of garlic and onion to spiral up from the cast iron pan.

Queenie doesn’t want to be the first to name the Erumpent in the room, but she’s seen what happens when you let these things get away from you. “What if it’s a Dementor?”

“There have never been Dementors in North America. Queenie, I know you were sad about Obliviating Jacob—”

“Not like that. Not falling-down-in-the-street miserable.” She spins to look at Tina, gray and pale amidst the comforting rose-beige fustiness of their apartment, but Tina is looking down at her own hands spread against the dark table top. “Jacob was a fling. I know that.” _Look at me,_ she wills, but even if she had the focus at this moment to send a thought, she’d need the same eye contact she’s trying to demand.

“I should help you with dinner.”

“Dinner’s fine. It’s the last of the brisket, potato pancakes, and apple sauce. You can set the table.”

She turns back to the stove so she doesn’t have to see the dishes fly to set only two places. The night there were four settings—the night she made strudel for Jacob—was only one night in twenty-three years of nights. Jacob’s joy and amazement at a little thing she’s done since she was fourteen is not the benchmark of all dinners to come.

“Was it cold and dark?” Tina asks over the clatter of landing silverware.

“It’s New York in December. What do you think?” With a point of Queenie’s wand, the potato pancakes flip themselves, settling golden-brown side up. “No. It wasn’t more dark than it should have been. It wasn’t foggy, either.”

“Even Grindelwald wouldn’t set Dementors lose in New York City.”

This time, when Queenie turns, Tina lets her see roiling thought _::please let her be imagining it, let it be something routine, Grindelwald just wants power, he wouldn’t set Dementors loose, where would he even get one, I’d rather have my own sister be miserable than believe Grindelwald would do such a thing, what kind of person have I become?::_

“It wasn’t very cold at all,” Queenie says, forcing a smile.

“If Grindelwald had Dementors, he wouldn’t have needed an Obscurus.”

“I guess not.” One potato pancake misses the rim of the brown-wiggentree-patterned platter and falls with a splat to the stove top, as if it somehow ignored the spell that assigned it the ability to move. Queenie picks it up with trembling fingers, drops it on the pile, then sucks her scorched fingertips. “I’m fine. Really. It’s just been a week with a lot of changes.”

Under Tina’s worried gaze, Queenie forces herself to move with a decent imitation of her usual lilting step. Stuck in the frame of the mirror above the mantle. . . yes! The pasteboard card she chooses from the clutter of Christmas cards and invitations is printed with holly leaves that prick her brushing fingertips.

“I’ve got something to look forward to,” Queenie says, dropping the card on the table next to Tina’s plate. “The Christmas ball to benefit the Manhattan Homeopathic Hospital. Everyone will be there.”

 _::All the eligible wizards our age::_ As Tina drops her gaze, Queenie catches an additional flash of _::If Newt comes back next year, I don’t have to care if anyone dances with me.::_

“All the eligible wizards,” Queenie repeats. “You’ll see, I’m not carrying a torch for Jacob Kowalski, not a bit.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

The third-worst part of any party is getting Tina to agree to be dolled-up.

“I’ll just transfigure something,” Tina says as she sets a warming charm on her cloche. “Preferably a snow suit, if this weather keeps up.”

“It can’t.” Queenie has set warming charms on her gloves, her hat, her scarf, both lapels of her big pink coat, and the toes of her shoes. Any No-Majs who pass them on the street, heads bent against the icy wind, won’t have the energy to notice if one person’s footsteps melt a little snow.

In these temperatures, it’s harder to pick out that magic blast of chilly misery, but Queenie thinks she’s felt it three more times during her walks home from work.

Not one of them triggered anything in the wand-use records. Queenie’s first try at flirting her way to a gander at the records was met by _::another Dorcus, wonder what she’s gaming for::_ , but with patience, she found a warden who’d missed the excitement with Grindelwald entirely. She wasn’t sure _how_ that was possible—stolid stupidity seemed like an option, as did a remarkably well-timed smoke break on the day that whomping swaths of Manhattan were smashed to bits by an Obscurus—but it was, and all it got her was proof there was nothing to see.

“It’d be simpler to Apparate,” Tina says. “You know half the congregation will.”

“It just seems. . . I don’t know.” With one—well, one-and-a-half—exceptions, Jewish witches and wizards don’t use magic on the Sabbath. The one exception is opening the secret door on the side of the elaborate Moorish bulk of the Central Synagogue, to reach the _other,_ wizarding synagogue behind/beside/between the visible one.

The half an exception is Apparating, for the very young or very old, the infirm, those who live too far away to walk, and in conditions of extreme weather. There is only one wizarding synagogue in all of New York City, so while it’s an hour’s comfortable walk for Tina and Queenie when a howling wind isn’t whipping up a frigid gale, it’s a trip of miles for some of the others who have workshops in Brooklyn.

When Tina opens the front door and the wind slaps Queenie’s face numb, despite her charms, she almost says yes to Apparating. But the blankness that has stalked her since the middle of last week persists: the image of onion domes and arched windows blurs and slips, until she’s not sure if the synagogue has two towers or three or five.

“We’re _not_ walking,” Tina says. She pulls Queenie down the stairs and into the shadow between front entrances. Before Queenie can protest, she feels the squeezing sensation of being sidecar- Apparated, and then she’s looking up at a different stone corner. When she steps into the wind again, she can see the onion domes, and there are two, just as there always have been.

She’s never known if the pocket universe of the wizarding synagogue looks like the No-Maj version—because she’s never seen the interior of the No-Maj version. Hers is a tiny jewel-box of a space, with starry skies overhead, supported by arches tiled with mosaics of fruits and flowers native to the New World. Carved tree branches, sinuous with narrow leaves, bearing ten round fruit like pomegranates, support the ark.

Minds here are mostly focused on prayers, on the weather, on hopes for grandchildren, worries about work, and plans for brunch. The tide of glances brings her only one _::poor girl, chin up::_ , two curious thoughts aimed at Tina, and a distant _::how do we know she’s not another Dorcus?::_

Letting her attention wander during the service—because the first Torah reading names the sons of Jacob who went to Egypt, and if she thinks of _Jacob_ and sons, she’s going to cry, in a good way, because she wants him to be happy, with strong sons to carry on his bakery if he ever gets it, which means a pretty wife who isn’t her, and she accepts this, really, so it’d be happy tears but still hard to explain in this place and time—Queenie notes every unmarried male near her own age.

There are two.

Malachi Friedenthal has filled out impressively since he was a gangling youth two classes behind her at Ilvermorny. His broad shoulders and aquiline profile should make him a heart throb, even if his gray suit is a cut that’s never fashionable enough to be out of fashion.

For an instant, her gaze meets his flashing brown eyes, and she’s tangled in violet-scented ribbons and lace. _::Judith::_ Unwinding the thought, she finds the sweet face of a brown-haired girl in a tennis frock, the daughter of a Viennese banker, Malachi’s second cousin and intended bride.

Bertram Rose, three years older than her and more _comfortably_ built, has his mind firmly on the day’s prayers. But Queenie strongly suspects he was in on a particularly nasty hexing incident at school, involving boot-laces, a hophornbeam tree, and a bucket of quahogs.

Afterward, over the current stylish nosh of bagels with lox, cream cheese, red onion, and capers, she talks only with the _grossmutters_ and the little children, because the idea of marrying _anyone_ before she has her fun is silly.

Magic-free Sabbath means an afternoon curled up in a chair, doing the crossword puzzle in last week’s Sunday edition of the _New York Ghost_. After becoming hopelessly entangled in three-letter words for rivers in places that may exist only on alternate Tuesdays, Queenie sighs and looks for something to read. Tina is immersed in _The Age of Innocents,_ and borrowing that would be a terrible idea anyway, since it’s about events leading up to Rappaport’s ban on fraternizing with the No-Maj population.

Cookbooks count as work, she’s already read the latest _Witches’ Friend,_ and that leaves her with the latest purple-backed novel from Esme Jennet-Peel: _Witch of the Desert Star._ Queenie rummages in the half-eaten box of Faery Mab chocolates, pulls out one that’s probably pineapple-moonbeam, and tries to pin her attention to a story that has nothing to do with fantastic beasts or bakeries or MACUSA leaders who prove to be international criminals.

Like every other Jennet-Peel novel, the heroine is an English witch who ventures into a desert. Any desert will do. “Does Arizona even have camels?” Queenie asks Tina, who shrugs.

“Do you think Frank’s home by now?” Tina asks, five minute later.

Queenie doesn’t have to close her eyes to see it again: Frank the Thunderbird swooping into the storm clouds on magnificent white-and-gold wings, bearing the vial that would bring the rain of Obliviation down on the shattered city. His wings seemed to fill the whole sky with lightning as he circled. And then he soared west, sweeping through the clouds toward an unseen sunset.

Jacob stepped into the rain and let it wash away all memory of magic, all memory of her, as if those things were sins, like the Second Salem people claimed.

Better not to imagine Frank gliding on sunset-gilded wings over the tent of the bold-yet-demure Ariadne Araminta Cowper-Longress as she rests in the captivity of a saturnine wizard of dubious intentions but masterful kissing technique.

 _It’d be like dating Grindelwald,_ Queenie hears herself thinking, halfway down a page that she’s read three times without remembering the first two. _You’d be terrified all the time and not really having fun._

Jacob seemed like a person it was possible to have fun with. Not that they really had a chance to try, except at the Blind Pig, where he downed his giggle water, game as you please. He’d be _comfortable_ to have at home, too, and she’d be as good at working in a bakery as at pouring coffee and unjinxing johns at MACUSA.

Except that’s not a life she can have.

So she teases Tina about the dresses she wants Tina to see, the ones that shimmer blue and green and purple like the skin of an Occamy.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

The freezing spell stretches so long that they don’t go see the dresses until the next Thursday night.

Queenie’s plan was to go on Sunday, when stores are closed. Buying a dress from a No-Maj shop would skirt the edges of Rappaport’s Law, and it’s easy enough to transfigure one of the boring gray frocks sold at the big Spratt-Alexander store that lurks just off the Miracle Mile.

On a normal Sunday, the most purposeful walker on the Mile would be Madame Delatenue, who makes her living by transfiguring wardrobes for top-drawer witches who can’t remember a ruffle or a swag well enough to recreate fashions themselves. But on the last Thursday night before Christmas, the street is crowded with No-Maj shoppers, frantic to find their last few presents.

“We’re just looking,” Queenie reminds Tina again. “You don’t even have to try it on. I just need a better look, and then I want you to _see_ it because you don’t appreciate a mirror enough to admire what you’re wearing when you’re wearing it.”

“I’m not the person who’ll be looking at me when I’m wearing it.”

“If you don’t think you’re pretty, no one else will.”

“I didn’t think about it at all when. . . wouldn’t any kid old enough to pick up that teddy bear be too old for toys?”

Queenie has to smile at the waist-high mink teddy bear in the window. “That’s for big girls to play with. Your Newt probably thinks the one thing missing from a nice witch is snakes in her hair. . . or, or scales. Or feathers and breathing fire. Which is sweet, but no reason not to have some fun with a nice dress.”

Sidling past a man loaded to the eyebrows with packages, a woman explaining to two children that Santa would bring a toy train _only_ if they held her hand and walked nicely _right now,_ and a pair of young No-Maj women whispering about suitors and cigarettes, Queenie nudges Tina toward _that_ window.

Part of her is braced against that mysterious, wretched chill that she’s sure is magic. Today’s temperatures in the thirties feel like spring, compared to last week, so she won’t mistake _weather_ for anything else.

What she’s not braced for is Tina going stiff and stock still when she sees the Occamy dresses.

They glow in the artificial light: iridescent tubes of brilliant blue to the knees, with gauzy swags and trains and scarfs in greens and purples and a black that turns gold as Queenie tilts her head. The dresses are beaded in patterns of chevrons and feathers, and each mannequin wears a feathered headband and carries a fan.

“The Obliviation,” Tina breathes. “Someone remembers.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

 “This is a disaster,” are Tina’s next words.

Queenie’s mind races for reasons why a little bit of remembering is not a disaster. “They’re just dresses,” she says, kicking herself for not thinking that if she’s calling them Occamy dresses, they could be based on actual Occamies.

“I have to talk with whoever put them in the store.”

“Tina. They’re No-Maj. We can’t just—”

But Tina’s wearing her _full-speed-ahead-I’m-an-Auror_ expression, even though she’s _not_ an Auror right now and she has no jurisdiction over No-Majs anyway. She barges through the tall glass-and-bronze doors, leaving Queenie the choice of standing around outside where that _feeling_ might find her— _no thank you,_ she thinks with a shudder that’s not from cold—or following her into a No-Maj dress store.

Indoors, the air feels almost hot with overlapped conversations and the jasmine languor of Narcisse Noir. Tina strides between racks of shimmering dresses like a purposeful gray beetle. Queenie can’t resist lingering to stroke the furry texture of a velvet wrap or to feel the clinking, sparkling weight of a beaded flounce.

So she’s a minute or two late to Tina’s confrontation with a tiny gal with a sleek black bob, a smart black dress, eyebrows arched at the peak of fashion, a perfect cherry-red cupid’s bow. Meeting her brown eyes gives a name—Mildred Balash—and an internal monolog composed equally of barking dogs, longing for supper, and impatience with how every third shopper _will_ insist on trying dresses a size too small so that tidying the dressing rooms is twice as much work as it should be.

“We’ve had them in the window for two weeks,” Miss Balash drawls. Tina’s mental arithmetic is almost visible in the air above her head.

“So these would have been made about December eighth?”

Miss Balash waves a hand in a gesture that almost demands an ivory cigarette holder. “Oh, eons before that. All that beading, you know. The designs get done a year in advance. Mr. Larkin goes to all the Paris shows.”

_::Someday I’m going to Paris. Draping fabric on a mannequin. I can do that. Mr. Larkin just copies. I want to be the person who invents a color.::_

“A year,” Tina repeats.

“Oh, easily. We can’t just wave a wand and boom, a thousand dresses in the latest styles.”

Queenie suppresses a giggle as she slips a hand through Tina’s arm. “She wants to try one on.”

“I couldn’t. We’re not. . .”

Queenie tells Miss Balash her sister’s size and smiles at the agreement in the shop-girl’s mind. To Tina, she whispers: “It’ll make us look more normal.”

 _Normal_ is not, of course, the word for how Tina looks in an Occamy dress. _Magnificent_ is. The dress brings out the blue highlights in her dark hair and gives her a floating grace that even her awkward step in circles around the dressing room can’t bring down to earth.

“That’s the bee’s knees,” Queenie says, clapping her hands. “Newt needs to see you in this.”

Tina’s eyes look huge as she watches herself in the mirror. “Newt doesn’t want to _date_ an Occamy. I don’t think.”

They can’t buy the dress, not with dragots, and probably not with any reasonable amount of dollars they could change their dragots to. Queenie can hear enough from Miss Balash to guess that Mr. Larkin steals designs, so there’s no reason to start feeling bad about just copying the dress through Transfiguration—and she’s making sure to have a fascinated-yet-embarrassed Tina pose this way and that so she can remember every detail.

It seems unfair that Miss Balash won’t make anything from waiting on them, though, so on their way out, Queenie points her wand under cover of her coat sleeve and whispers a spell for easing pain. Miss Balash gives a little jump, then tension drains from her face.

“What did you do?” Tina hisses in Queenie’s ear as the night air, brisk with motor oil and pine, gives them a cold smack in the face.

“Her feet hurt. It was the right thing to do.”

“It was magic in front of a No-Maj.” Tina has that Auror expression again.

“She doesn’t know what happened.”

“You can’t just start bending the rules.”

“It’s too late now.” Queenie pulls her sister through the crowd of shoppers. One knot in her stomach tells her she was wrong to use magic. Another tells her that she would have been wrong to leave Miss Balash vaguely resenting them. There’s enough resentment in the world as it is. “Anyway, the dresses were just a coincidence. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

“A year to make a dress.”

“They can’t just wave a wand.” Queenie smiles, but Tina’s already too abstracted by her own thoughts to return it.

“I know. It’s just. . . how are we supposed to enforce rules about magic, when there are coincidences?”

“The same way you always have?”

“If there’s magic, there ought to be destiny. What. . . ?” Tina’s expression goes blank an instant before the chill despair hits Queenie, too. “ _No._ It’s not fair. _No._ I didn’t _do_ anything.”

Queenie forces her feet into motion. “Come on. We have to move away from it. _Now._ ” The misery soaking into her bones tells her to stop, fall, give up, she can’t save Tina, she can’t save herself, Jacob has forgotten her, and it doesn’t _matter,_ just give up.

There are tears streaming down her face when the sorrow lets go. She and Tina are standing on a different corner, under the snow-covered branches of a sprawling tree. She has no idea how they go there.

Tina opens her mouth slowly, as if she’s unthawing. “You’re right. That was magic.”

“Don’t you dare run back after it.”

“No.” Tina’s thoughts are a jumble of zoological facts dimly remembered from school, calculations of how to search a city, and fragments of her terror when MACUSA tried to execute her for treason. “I’m not running after that without a better idea what it is.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

For the Christmas dance the next night, Tina insists on Transfiguring into a dark blue gown with a simple chevron design of beads. “It’s more me,” is all she says.

Queenie’s gown sparkles like the champagne it shares a color with. She goes all out with the design because why not—she _can_ just wave a wand and have whatever dress she likes.

“Who does all that beading, anyway?” she asks Tina as she’s checking her over before they leave for the party, because Tina _will not_ look at herself for more than three seconds in a mirror, so somebody’s got to make sure her headband is at the right angle and so is her lipstick.

“There are factories. Sort of. Women sit and bead all day.”

“No-Majs are strange.” Queenie twirls in front of the mirror, decides one fewer layer of fringe would look better, and removes the unwanted trim with a wand flourish and a word. “What’s it like, looking at beads all day. I think you’d squint.” _And your fingers would hurt. It’d be the most boring thing ever._ “It’s too bad we can’t teach them how to do it with magic.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

Queenie’s smile doesn’t waver when, in turning to accept a glass of punch, she accidentally meets the eyes of Mrs. Van Toverspreuk, the loftiest matron of New York’s wizarding world, and hears _::Girls these days. All flash and feathers. She’ll be another Dorcus, just wait and see.::_

She can feel blood heat her face, though deftly applied powder and blusher keep all that a secret from observers. Fluffing the ends of her hair is a temptation she can’t quite resist, which is why her elbow bumps—

A well-tailored chest. Which sits beneath a neat white tie and collar, which sits beneath a strong square chin, which belongs to a face that might be a little too rugged to be called handsome, but Queenie doubts most girls would belabor the point. The man exists the other direction, too, right down to large, well-polished dress shoes that are almost as shiny as his blond hair.

“I beg your pardon,” she blurts, intending to make nothing more of it.

“Should I beg our hostess for an introduction or can we be modern and trade monikers?” the man asks.

“You’re a wizard,” Queenie says. Of course he is. It’s a _wizarding ball._ But she hasn’t seen him around MACUSA or at any other party she can remember.

“Walter McDermott, at your service.”

She introduces herself because it’s polite and because she wants to dance. She already knows exactly which fellow wage-slaves at MACUSA are dead hoofers and which are live wires, so at least whatever Walter McDermott’s thing is, it’ll be new.

Walter McDermott turns out to be such a divine dancer that she doesn’t want to share him. Over a plate of deviled eggs and a third glass of punch—this time spiked with giggle juice—he tells her about his job at the big wholesale trading house for magical supplies. Everything in the top of his mind is flattering admiration for her, awe at the size of the party, and brooms.

“Brooms?” she says, right in the middle of his sentence, which is a mistake Legilimens learn not to make. She can’t excuse it as surprise at how the potted palm guarding their corner snags used dishes from passersby, as she’s met Mrs. Van Toverspreuk’s plants at every important wizarding party for the past five years.

“Did that palm tree just pinch a gal on the fanny?” Walter asks.

“It’s partial to redheads.”

“Anyway, we’re getting our first load of Clean Sweeps for the new year, and I’ll tell you, it’s a superior broom in every way. You get your brooms from the Illinois New Broom Company, no doubt, and that’s not a _bad_ broom, no sirree bob, but it’s not a top of the line broom, either.”

“I can’t remember the last time I rode a broom.” It’s meant as a memory, comes out as a hint.

“Too conspicuous in the Big Apple? Well, wait until you want a weekend out on the shore. A broom’s essential for getting around, and you want one that’s reliable but also has some speed and pick-up. Clean Sweep is the broom for that. Wait until summer. Everyone who’s anyone will be on a Clean Sweep.”

He’s three deviled eggs and fifteen minutes into a story about a race between a Clean Sweep broom and an Illinois broom when Tina slaps her way past the potted palm. Her lipstick needs refreshing and her headband is askew, but she’s smiling, sort of and all Queenie sees in her eyes is the memory of hectic dancing.

It’s a great relief not to see disappointment.

“I’m beat,” Tina says. “We should go home.” _::I want to stop while it’s still fun. I don’t want it to end, and I need to end it before something ends it for me.::_

Queenie makes introductions, and of course if Tina wants to go home, they’re going home. When Walter stands to escort them to their hostess to say goodnight—he has good manners, and any gal would call him handsome—Queenie looks up at him and asks cheekily: “Cash or check?”

“Check,” he says promptly, which is perfect good manners but not much fun. She can see that he wants to cash that check soon, though, so she stands on tiptoe and gives him a peck on the cheek.

He walks them all the way to the little courtyard that guests use for Apparating and watches them vanish as if he’s making sure they’re safe.

“You had a good time,” Queenie says to Tina as they’re getting undressed. If she didn’t say the obvious sometimes, entire conversations with Tina would consist of significant glances.

“A surprising number of people think that battling Grindelwald gives a person dancing skills.”

“Does it?”

“Not particularly.” Tina’s humming, though, more than a person putting on pajamas usually hums. “I wonder what Newt’s people do for Christmas.”

“When was the last time we rode brooms?”

Tina blinks. “Two summers ago. That Young Jewish Wizards week in the Catskills. Remember? We went riding in the mountains—”

“And the updrafts were awful.” Queenie remembers the wood bucking against her hands. “The view was something, though.”

“Robbie Kirchner threw up.”

“Then Sara whatshername. . . Tapiero. . . got engaged to him anyway. Do you want cocoa?”

“I think part of her deal was that he was a gent when she outflew him. Yes, please, on the cocoa. Why were you lurking in the corner with that Walter person?”

“He seemed nice. He imports brooms.” _He was not comparing me to Dorcus Twelvetrees._

Queenie addresses herself to making cocoa with the practiced ease that neither fatigue nor giggle-juice can blunt. “He must have been a couple years ahead of you at Ilvermorny.”

She turns in time to see Tina shake her head, with a vague expression that isn’t quite a frown. “He must have been one that shot up and filled out after he graduated. Nothing about him rings a bell.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

 “I didn’t go to Ilvermorny,” Walter says. It’s late afternoon on Christmas Day, and he’s taken Queenie out for a walk around Madison Square Park— _to digest his dinner,_ he says. When Queenie left, Tina was surrounded by piles of books, trying to identify what might have attacked them on Thursday night. _It’s not work because I’m not an Auror,_ Tina said as Queenie waved goodbye. _It’s survival._

“Everybody goes to Ilvermorny. It’s the best wizarding school in the world.”

“My parents wouldn’t have stood for someone whisking their son away to some school way up in Massachusetts. I went to lessons after school with the draoi, same as people took piano or violin.”

She can see the word _draoi_ in his head, written on ivory-tinted paper in the elaborate swirling handwriting of two generations earlier. It connects to a memory of a grizzled man with a beard scolding him for turning five-pointed spring leaves into scarlet-and-purple butterflies.

Their footsteps swish on paths damp from melted snow. The day is still warm enough that Queenie has her coat unbuttoned and free of heat charms. There’s warmth from Walter, too, just a little, like a fire she can fan or extinguish.

“There were never more than two of us in his school at one time,” Walter goes on. “Margaret finished high school before I started, and I was in my first year of college when Frank started. Euphemia went off to Ilvermorny after a year with Mr. O’Shaughnessy, but her parents were wizards and she used to chatter about how she’d be there the minute she was allowed to go.”

“So that’s why Euphemia Morris acted like Potions was old news to her. She used to go all mysterious about _ways in Minneapolis._ ”

Euphemia Morris had also stumbled in classes because, though her spells worked, she used the wrong words, but it’d be impolite to say that.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

Late on Christmas Day, when Queenie says _Pamatanamoky_ to adjust the flame on the gas stove, she has a question for Tina.

“How come some of our words for spells sound one way and some are totally different?”

“Because they’re different words?” Tina sets a book back on the stack with a thud. The pile of unread grew bigger as soon as the sun dropped behind the city’s towers, but the two heaps are equalizing now.

“No, I mean when I want to make the stove hotter, the word’s all ah-ah-ah and like playing a drum. But when you summoned those books, that spell’s all ee-oh, and the word’s short. Some spells with those sounds, even when the word’s long, it’s got a different rhythm to it. It’s like they’re not the same _language._ ”

“They’re not.”

Queenie has to lean through the doorway to make eye contact with Tina, but her sister’s silence suggests she’s supposed to. What she sees in Tina’s head is a tangle of memories from maybe first- or second-year at Ilvermorny. Trees outside the classroom window are red and gold, her pencils are all new and sharp, and a mousy woman in blue-and-cranberry robes is explaining something with sweeping gestures that seem bigger than she is.

“You had Miss Eldredge for Wizarding History, that’s why you remember anything,” Queenie says. “Mr. Pelmenny just droned on and on, and in first period, it was enough to send a gal back to sleep. I’m lucky I know the capital wasn’t always New York City.”

That’s enough to get Tina talking while the water bubbles and Queenie stirs in cocoa powder and sugar.

“You remember Isolt Sayre, though?”

“Even Mr. Pelmenny couldn’t make Isolt Sayre surviving in the wilderness boring. Though he tried.”

“Then you remember about the Wampanoag. She taught them wand work and they taught her some of their spells. That’s why some of Newt’s spells sounded so odd. We use the Wampanoag words, and he uses Latin or Greek.”

“Somehow I thought those native words were just for our houses. Go Pukwudgie!”

Tina sticks out her tongue and does the Thunderbird House hand sign, which involves flapping.

“You probably even remember the names of the Wampa. . . Wampa. . .”

Queenie lowers the flame—using another Wampanoag word, she bets—and adds milk before Tina answers. “I don’t think we ever learned their names.”

“We got spells from them and don’t remember their names? That’s rude.”

“It’s probably in Isolt Sayre’s diaries. If they taught us every fact in school, we’d never graduate.”

 _A name wouldn’t take more than a minute, though._ Queenie can see in her mind’s eye the history textbook, with illustrations of dark reddish-skinned people with long black braids, dressed in buckskin and feathers. “Nobody at Ilvermorny looked like them.”

“They died, mostly. There was an epidemic.”

As she pours the cocoa into mugs, Queenie struggles with a sense of something vaguely _wrong_ that she can’t quite name. The Wampanoag have mostly been dead her whole life, so this fact shouldn’t change the world, except it does. It makes her want to give them back some magic words, but what that would solve, she can’t imagine.

“Walter graduated from a No-Maj college,” she says instead. “Can you imagine, being in school until you’re twenty-two?”

“He’s pulling your leg.” Tina sips her cocoa while Queenie curls up in a chair and pulls a quilt over her feet.

“He says there are maybe fifty wizards in all of Minneapolis, which isn’t enough to live apart from No-Majs. They just stay secret. He got a degree in _business._ ”

The whole thing he’d explained to her, on their walk, was weird No-Maj customs. Years and years in school, degrees in subjects that Ilvermorny never covered at all. . . it didn’t seem like there should be that much to learn, when there wasn’t magic to be covered.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Tina said. “Down in Wand Permits, we enchant the typewriters, but we don’t _make_ them.”

She doesn’t take the thought any further, so Queenie does the crossword from last Sunday’s _New York Ghost_ until she’s baffled by a seven-letter word with a G as the third letter, having a snout.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

In the weeks after Christmas, Queenie gets swept into Walter McDermott’s gang from the import-export house. Two or three times a week, a presentable wizard in a well-cut suit takes her dancing and to dinner. They all are, or could be, named Freddy or Melvin or Algernon.

She walks the empty streets less often. She Transfigures one of those boring gray smocks into a new dress in an outré shade of pink.

She hears _::another Dorcus::_ in people’s thoughts less often as the days go by.

She doesn’t stop dreaming of Jacob Kowalski.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

She doesn’t stop walking because she’s come to like the fresh air, and anyway, she wants to see the spring frocks in the shop windows. The prospect of meeting the thing of cold despair again gives her the heebie-jeebies, but it hasn’t come back since the beginning of the new year.

If it weren’t for that night when Tina had been so terrified, she’d believe she’d invented it herself, out of loneliness. Having to use her own sister’s suffering as a gauge of her own sanity makes Queenie slap her steps on the pavement a little harder.

This time, when the icy misery hits, she’s crossing Houston, so it’s _vital_ she keep pushing against the wall of despair or she’ll be smashed in traffic, and while she doesn’t at this moment care, some core instinct tells her that she ought to.

A little girl in a faded coat slips and falls in front of a Model T that’s going too fast to stop.

Queenie, safely on the far sidewalk and panting with relief, doesn’t ask herself if it’s right or legal to say the words to whip the girl from under the car’s wheels. She just _does it,_ and it’s only when the girl is curled up on the ground next to her, and she’s patting the little one’s dark curls and telling her it’s okay, that she makes the excuse that anyone in a crowd would mistake her wand for a cigarette holder.

That’d be scandalous on a public street, but gals do it, and anyway, she’s not sorry.

She returns the child to a mother in a kerchief, who talks a language Queenie doesn’t recognize, but her thanks is clear in her thoughts. That’s when Queenie realizes the spell she used to save the child is one of those Wampanoag words.

All the rest of the way home, she searches the crowd for dark reddish-brown faces like _Wizarding America: Pathways to the Present_ , but there aren’t any.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

She tells Tina what happened because she tells Tina everything.

Most things.

A lot of things.

“We can’t save all of them,” is all Tina says. The happy humming sound she was making over writing a letter has stopped. “Sometimes we can’t even save one of our own.”

Queenie doesn’t need to look to see that Tina is thinking about Credence Barebone.

Queenie hugs her sister because sometimes sisters should be hugged.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

Queenie walks because she won’t let fear rule her, even though Tina hasn’t found an answer.

If her heart pounds a little faster when her eye catches someone in the crowd with brown hair and a comfortable shape, the sensation doesn’t survive the instant she meets his eyes.

Sometimes she wonders how it’d be if Legilimency were harder for her. She’d had to work at it in school, of course, but that was like playing a sport, not like memorizing multiplication tables.

If Legilimency were harder, she’d have a longer moment of hope before she knew it wasn’t Jacob.

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

As Queenie walks, the streets seem full of absence.

It’s not that the crowds press against her less. She is jostled as much as she ever was and has to dodge carts and automobiles as much as she ever did.

It’s all the people who aren’t there.

Jacob’s not there, but she’s gotten used to that. He’s _somewhere,_ at least.

The Wampanoag aren’t there. Maybe they were never in New York, but someone like them must have been. Every time she uses a spell that might be theirs, she looks around for dark red skin and black hair.

The young men aren’t there. It wasn’t her classmates that died in the Great War, but the ones a few years ahead, enough so that Ilvermorny had a plaque. She never realized, before she started looking at the parade of children, old men, and women, how war had ravaged the No Majs.

It’s a comfort, in a way, to venture into the blocks of tenements, where the sheer _smell_ of garlic and diapers and rotting vegetables and untaken baths reassures her that the people she sees are what’s real.

The further she wanders into the streets to the right of Broadway—she’s never had a good sense of direction, but it’s to her right as she walks home—the more she hears languages and sees faces like no one at MACUSA. When she looks into people’s eyes, she can see images and feel emotions, but the words slide away from her in a litany of sounds she’s not sure her mouth can form.

So a glimmer of familiarity one Sunday afternoon brings her to a halt. It’s Hebrew, bubbling through a joint between two doors to one of the workshops along the narrow street, forming a prayer.

The language of the streets, spoken by women in kerchiefs, means nothing to her. But these people are Jewish. Like her, like Tina, like fewer than one hundred other people in the wizarding world of New York City.

She reaches for the door handle, but there’s a hand on her arm, and a babble of words from one of the women in kerchiefs. _::You can’t go there::_ is plain despite the language barrier.

“But I’m Jewish, too,” she says. “It’s all right.”

“Only the men do the _minha._ ” The new voice belongs to a sharp-faced gal with a crown of blond braids. In this place, her green rayon dress, under a plain brown coat, looks insanely fashionable, though it’s longer and more concealing than what Queenie’s used to wearing. More important, there’s a sparkle about her. _Magic._

Queenie looks into the gal’s pale blue eyes and sees wariness, intelligence, envy of Queenie’s dress quickly slapped down with just a hint of self-righteousness. . . replaced by confident assurance that this is _her_ territory, not the place for some fancied-up outsider who doesn’t know not to interrupt _minha._

“You’re reading my mind,” the gal says, quietly enough not to be overheard by the women talking on their stoops or walking with baby carriages.

“It’s not _exactly_ mind-reading. . .” Queenie starts into what she was taught at Ilvermorny, then shrugs because finding a witch right here in the East Side ghetto, a Jewish witch, is more important than reciting exam answers. “Yes. I’m reading your mind. Do you want to take a walk?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you do.” She can see herself through this gal’s eyes: polished, exotic, an outsider, possibly the sort of do-gooder who always ends up disappointed at how different things are here than in whatever swanky neighborhood she came from. “I’m Queenie Goldstein.”

“Sofia Reznik.”

They weave along the cluttered sidewalk of a street so narrow that sunlight doesn’t hit the bottom, beneath signs that proclaim _Rooms to Let – Electricity - Janitor_ and _Delicatessen – Lunch Daily_. “What do you know?” Queenie asks.

“What the babushka teaches. How else?”

Queenie can’t answer that question yet, though her blood’s racing. “What do you think you are?”

“ _Koldun’ya_.” Sofia has to say it three times before Queenie feels she’s caught the lilt of that first _o_. The image in Sofia’s mind skids past herbs being pounded with a pestle, to a row of trinkets that glow with enchantment.

“Has anyone like me been here before?”

Sofia looks her over, eyes narrowed. On impulse, Queenie makes eye contact, clasps Sofia’s calloused hand, and sends a picture of Percival Graves, all sour demeanor and flapping robes.

“Yes.” Sofia pulls her hand away and looks at the children playing in the street as they walk a little faster. “He came looking for children who had. . . had eaten their magic. He found nothing.”

“He didn’t know there were koldun’yas here?”

That earns a sharp glance. “We know how to hide.”

“But the wizarding world would welcome you!”

“He wanted to take children away. That’s not a welcome.”

“It’s because wizards and witches can’t live safely among No-Majs.”

“Yet here we are.” Sofia gestures toward a narrow storefront, and it’s just at that moment that the _despair_ hits again. As Queenie steadies herself on a protruding bit of iron molding, she can see shoulders slump as the cries of street vendors and the shouts of conversation fall quiet. A baby lets loose a wail that sends shivers down her spine.

“Pogrebin.” Sofia starts a gesture, then lets her hand fall. “You make it appear.”

“How?” Queenie wails. “I’m not unhappy. I’m not. Not like this.”

“No, no, no. I mean, I want you to say the magic to let us see it. It pretends to be a rock. We need to see it to vanish it.”

Queenie’s mind stalls and stutters, whining at the unfairness of testing her magic now, curdling away from the horror of doing magic in public at all. She shakes her wand out of her coat sleeve into her hand before she realizes she has no idea where to point it. There’s no _point_ in pointing it, there’s nothing to do, it’s all hopeless. Sofia stares at her like the interloper she is. She shouldn’t _be_ here. She shouldn’t _exist._

“ _Qussukquanog,_ ” she says, and one brown block from a front stoop separates itself and forms into a tiny man with a giant rock-like head, dancing with rage that it’s beyond her capacity to feel.”

“That’s a Pogrebin,” Sofia repeats. “The babushka says the ones in Russia were gray, but these are native.”

Queenie is trembling. The barrage of despair is stronger when she looks into the Pogrebin’s eyes. “How do you live with them?”

Sofia points—not a wand, but her finger. “ _Strakha strakha obaldet ot schastya_.”

The words seem to splatter around the Pogrebin, freezing the demon with its touch. His eyes close, and despair recedes from Queenie so fast and so thoroughly that she feels faint.

“Mostly, we wear amulets, though. That one’s been following you, hasn’t he? You need an amulet.”

As Queenie follows Sofia along a block that’s come alive again. She wants to chant the children’s jump-rope songs from the sheer joy of _noise_ —and then the words resolve into a language she heard as a child and sometimes hears from the oldest grandparents at the synagogue. It’s a song about a donkey—she has to get _that_ word from the mind of a little boy who glances her way—and with that recognition, she’s able to make out a word here and there of what the grown-ups around them say.

“I wish I knew more Yiddish,” she says. She’s also frankly curious about a magic that uses whatever an _amulet_ is. Spells usually go from wands to things, but an amulet, as Sofia describes it during their walk, holds a spell in one place, as if it’s a wand that’s on all the time.

“So learn it.” Sofia pulls open a glass door next to a narrow window that displays patent medicines and, to Queenie’s surprise, yarmulkes.  “Good afternoon, _bobe_.”

The gnarled little woman behind the counter is so rich with magic that it takes an effort to look away from her. When Queenie does, she’s startled by how _ordinary_ the shop is. The ceiling is lower and the room narrower than at the magical apothecary in Chelsea. The shelves look as if they have ten coats of white paint instead of four. But the tidy rows of bottles, the drawers labeled with herbs or minerals, the faintly astringent scent, and the aura of a place so clean no dust mote would dare land—these are all exactly the same.

“How do you keep this secret from No-Majs?” Queenie asks.

The babushka’s voice is deep, with a gravelly edge. “ _My ne_.”

“I told you,” Sofia says. “We need things to survive. All the magic our people are willing to accept is little enough against those determined to kill us.”

She looks Queenie directly in the eyes, offering a memory—no, it has the blurry background of something learned, not experienced—of prisons, of beatings, of homes burned, of bodies in white shrouds laid out all in a row. There are signs, too, in angular print that Queenie can’t read, but she knows from Sofia’s feelings that they say things like _No Jews Here._

The vision wobbles—sometimes the people fleeing for their lives down a rutted track are peasants, sometimes they’re dressed like Sofia, sometimes they’re in the rags of fashions of thirty years ago—and Queenie’s mind fills in some of the foggier figures with dark reddish-brown skin, black hair, and buckskins.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Miss Goldstein needs an amulet against a Pogrebin,” Sofia says to the babushka.

The babushka points a wizened finger at a drawer. Though Queenie would have said she couldn’t tell _exactly_ which drawer, she _can_ tell: the closer she approaches, the more she’s pulled one direction, not the other, until her hand closes around the knob of a drawer she’s sure is the right one.

Inside is a box of metal disks like coins, each embossed with the big-headed Pogrebin, surrounded by a ring of not-quite-Hebrew. Queenie chooses one, brings it to the well-scrubbed marble counter, and fumbles in her purse for a dragot.

“That’s not money here,” Sofia says after a flurry of unfamiliar words from the babushka. “We use the same as everyone else.”

All Queenie has of No-Maj money is two nickels. “This can’t be enough. I’ll have to come back.”

The babushka takes one nickel and pushes the other back across the counter, with two emphatic sentences.

“You will pay by teaching me your mind-reading,” Sofia says. “If you like.”

“Of course. Yes. I would. I mean, I’ve never taught anything, but I’ll try.”

In response to another statement from the babushka, Sofia adds: “She says I’m too much trouble to be paid with just one amulet, so you must pick another. Anything you like.”

Queenie walks slowly along the line of drawers, letting her hands brush the fronts, opening the ones that seem to speak to her. She toys with and discards tokens embossed with a sheep, a fountain, and a heart pierced by three swords, before choosing one where a map of the globe, entwined in ribbons, fills the whole surface.

When she shows it to Sofia, the other gal nods. “Help to find the thing you need most.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

“Pogrebin,” Tina says when Queenie opens the door to their apartment. “Newt’s owl’s ship arrived and he answered my letter, and he says what’s following you is a Pogrebin.”

Her cheeks are red and get redder every time she says Newt’s name.

“I know,” Queenie says, though she’s careful to say it _after_ hugging her sister. “I got protection. You won’t believe what I’ve learned about today.”

[[-]][[o]][[-]]

Queenie walks because she has to give Sofia her lessons in Legilimency.

Queenie walks to practice her Yiddish in shops where she uses American dollars without anyone thinking _another Dorcus._

Queenie walks because the amulet pinned insider her coat—the one with the world in ribbons—seems to pull her along narrow streets full of push carts and delivery vans and newspaper hawkers.

One day when the sun is out, the air is chilly, and everything feels like mud, Queenie walks along a street of narrow brick buildings with hooded windows, pale stone stripes, and flapping awnings. She’s not the only person on a mission: the entire push and shove of the crowd seems to converge on one shop with fresh paint and clean gold lettering—

She doesn’t read the lettering because the smell of butter and sugar has already drawn her to the pastries on display. The golden dough, shiny in its egg wash, is not shaped into rings or pockets or mounds, but into—

Occamy, coiled and mantling.

Niffler, with its cute round belly bulging as if it holds cream filling.

Erumpent, its hide rendered in flaking layers.

Demi-guise, coated in powdered sugar.

Queenie steps into the buttery warmth of the shop because she _has to_ have one of those Niffler pastries, even if she has to eat it on the way home to prevent Tina from going all Auror on her.

Queenie steps into the sugary air of the shop because she has to know who made these confections.

Queenie walks into the shop because part of her already knows.

Jacob Kowalski, comforting and brown behind the counter, looks across the shop at her, and her heart falls as she sees no recognition in his eyes, even though she _knows_ she saw him Obliviated.

Then his hand creeps to the spot on his neck where the Murtlap bit him.

The truth behind his eyes changes in a way that leaves Queenie warm from toe to head, as if she’s walked out of a snowstorm into a room with cocoa and a fire.

In this moment, everything’s Jake.

Queenie has always known what people want of her, and sometimes she’s sure of what she wants to give back.

* * *

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Now let's talk about history and numbers.
> 
> The wizarding population of Minneapolis is so low because I did the math, using a standard of 0.3% of a given population will be magical (someone else did that homework, based on Hogwarts' size) and the U.S. Census population figures for the era.
> 
> The smallness of the congregation at the wizarding synagogue is because the numbers are calculated against a population of Jewish people of German or Sephardic origin who came to the U.S. before the massive Eastern European immigration wave of the 1880s-1920s. This group had settled into being middle-class and were usually Reform. The more recently arrived Russian Jews of the Lower East Side didn't seem to fit with what we saw of MACUSA, so how they were excluded became a plot point.
> 
> As Ron Weasley pointed out, if there's no intermarriage with Muggles, wizards and witches have a very limited potential dating pool. This is even more true for Jewish witches who want to marry within their religion.
> 
> Languages are tricky. The idea behind the few Wampanoag words shown is that the word construction is changed from passive/inert to active/motion. (Any error is because in the hands of non-Wampanoags, the words have decayed.) It seemed logical that Isolt Sayre's experiments should have brought Wampanoag vocabulary into spell-casting, and since the Pottermore history of magic in North America doesn't name Isolt's native collaborators, it was time for Queenie to wonder about erasure and appropriation.
> 
> Sofia Reznik and her babushka speak Yiddish together but their spells are based in Russian. Attributing magic to a people who've been so thoroughly oppressed and persecuted begs the question of why magic didn't save them, and neither Sofia nor I have the answer. As might be expected from a community that was herded into ghettos for generations, their methods are dramatically different from what is taught at Ilvermorny or Hogwarts.
> 
> Walter McDermott's draoi likely got his magic from Irish traditions not represented at Hogwarts, though he was so isolated that it's possible he simply made things up. He was in the very first graduating class from the University of Minnesota's school of business.


End file.
